NFL Head Coach
June 30,2006 - The NFL Supplemental Draft is just starting to pick up, but that really isn’t anything to look forward to unless you’re a coach. The supplemental draft is the little hump to get over before Training Camp, and even with that you aren’t getting any football action. In fact, you don’t get any real football until August, so there’s nothing to be tripping over. Unless, of course, you’re one of those junkies who loves reading about all these off-season transactions and drama going on with different NFL franchises. If you’re one of those kinds of people and you just can’t get enough of that almost non-football stuff, EA Sports has the game for you with NFL Head Coach.

You can pretty much get the idea of what the game is all about just by reading the title. In short, you’re the head honcho of any NFL franchise. But you can’t just join the NFL ranks and suddenly get a head-coaching job, that’s something you’ll have to earn. Thankfully NFL Head Coach makes the job a little easier.

You’re an assistant coach for the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. (Seems fitting enough, considering Bill Cowher is on the cover.) With that, you’re a hot commodity with teams looking for new head coaches. Be that as it may, every team is looking for a new head coach, so you can choose any team you have your heart set on. From there on, you have the limited freedom of dressing up your coach with whatever gear you have. Hats, sweatpants, jackets—whatever you think you might want to use to make your coach more physically appealing, it’s all there.

After you’re done giving your coach an extreme makeover, the team’s owner will tell you to get to work. From here, you start of by hiring a coaching staff, which consists of the offensive, defensive, and special teams coordinators, strength and conditioning, and all that good stuff. Then it’s on to cutting and re-signing players on your current roster, getting the job done in free agency, and not let your organization go completely crazy before and during the NFL Draft. After the draft, you’ll have all sorts of monthly objectives to clear before the Pre-Season, and all of them pretty much have to do with daily practices. This is where things become a lot more interesting, yet from here on out, they also become a pain. They get more interesting because this is where you really get to get your mouth exercised and become a coach, but it’s a real pain because the game doesn’t give you as much freedom as we’d like it to give.

You can only do certain things during certain times, and most of what you’re actually doing is checking your e-mail. You can’t flush through the free agency and sign players until you get to the “sign players” period; that’s fine, it makes sense. But for every day in the game, it makes it so you only do a certain number of things. You only have three tasks a day, and signing a player would check one off the list. From there, it’s still fine, but it’s like the game is terribly broken because every little move results in a check off. So if you do something as basic as turning a backup player into a farther back reserve on your roster, or making him a starter—those would end up being a task. So you can find yourself only being able to make three or less moves on your depth chart a day, which really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Eventually if you get through Training Camp hell, the game starts to pick up when the actual football starts. Football is played through the Madden engine, but as you’d probably expect from a coaching sim, you can’t play. Luckily, NFL Head Coach gets you as involved as possible. In between every game, you go through an insurmountable amount of practices that force you to pick a few players and give them 10 reps to master the gameplan for the following week. This is how you raise each player’s attributes, seeing as how every week a random attribute will either go up or go down. If you choose to just simulate it, your players will go into their next game completely sluggish and lose, unless you’re using an extremely studded team like the Seattle Seahawks or Denver Broncos.

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